Author Scott Westerfeld has announced a series of graphic novels based on his "dystopian plastic surgery" Uglies series. But this time, the story's protagonist is Shay, Tally Youngblood's best frenemy. Westerfeld also announced the latest progress on the Uglies movie.

After discussing his steampunk alt-history series Leviathan at Comic-Con over the weekend, Westerfeld turned to his previous series, Uglies, set in a future where all teenagers have extreme plastic surgery at age 16 to become "pretty." Westerfeld announced that Del Rey will be publishing four manga-inspired Uglies graphic novels, outlined by Westerfeld, written by Devin Grayson (who created the Vertigo series USER and had a long stretch writing Nightwing, among other Batfamily titles), with art by artist Steven Cumming. Westerfeld says that he was inspired to tell this new story from the perspective of Shay — Tally's sometimes friend and sometimes nemesis — because so many readers accused Shay of simply being a "bitch," and he wanted to explore the other other side of the Tally-Shay story. The first volume is due out in May 2012.

The other bit of Uglies news concerns the eventual Uglies feature film. Lola Visual Effects, the company that gave us Benjamin Button's strange aging process, put Captain America's face on a scrawny body, and let us glimpse an older, grayer Harry Potter, will be providing the visual effects for Uglies and its characters' radical bodily transformations. Lola will also be financing and producing the film, taking us several steps closer to an Uglies live-action film.